STrategic Workforce Planning

It’s quite simple: every organization starts with a strategy. Whether you are a for-profit, non-profit, or governmental organization, you have a roadmap for where you’re headed and how you intend to get there.

Typically, within the strategy there would be a financial plan, a marketing plan, probably a technology plan. And there must be a people plan. Since, in all probability, people are your organization’s most valuable resource, it would be folly to embark on trying to execute a strategy without having a plan in place to ensure that you’ve got the right people to execute that strategy.

During a recent HCI conference of talent acquisition leaders, one of the participants captured the mood in the room saying, “Strategic workforce planning is a big hairy animal, and we all suck at it.” When asked for a show of hands, less than 10% of the crowd indicated they had a strategic workforce planning function at their organization.

As the new year begins, you may have spent some constructive time visioning, strategizing and planning how the year can play out. I found myself thinking about that after seeing an interview of Steve Jobs, about when he bought Pixar Films, and invested in developing the company’s potential year after year, because he believed in what they could achieve. Today Pixar is recognized as wildly successful. What I took away from that story is Job’s ability to identify potential for the future and make the investment in talent; both rely on being visionary. As leaders, when we make talent deployment decisions that will achieve our vision, we rely to some extent on instinct, as well as on available evidence, a deep understanding of the operations in our company, and emerging trends.

Nerds: Can’t live without ‘em … but it’s really hard to live with them because seriously how many more socially awkward number crunchers do we need running around here sucking the Cheetos dust from their fingertips whilst regaling you with tales of their latest conquest in World of Warcraft (that nine-year-old from Germany got seriously PWNED in case you didn’t hear) /how they are thinking that it’s finally time to get serious about writing that Stargate SG:1 script now that they found Richard Dean Anderson’s agent on LinkedIn. But, you can’t live without them either because nerds are good at stuff, useful stuff like predicting how many sales staff the organization needs, writing software code, and explaining the final episode of Lost (it was all a dream, I think)...

As I look back on the experiences I have had over the years, I am surprised and encouraged by the similarities between organizations that rely on volunteers and those that rely on paid, employed talent.